How To Establish Performance Measures Under the FAST Act Requirements

Collaborative Transportation Planning Governance

The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), enacted in 2012, was devised to make the Federal surface transportation proceedings more streamlined, performance-based, and to address challenges facing the U.S. transportation system, including improving safety, reducing traffic congestion, improving efficiency of the system, and reducing delays in project delivery.

On December 4, 2015, President Obama signed into law the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act), which funds surface transportation programs at over $305 billion for fiscal years 2016 through 2020.

The FAST Act builds on the changes made by MAP-21 and provides long-term funding certainty for surface transportation. These changes will improve innovation and efficiency in the development of projects, through the planning and environmental review process, to project delivery.

Federal law required that States and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) set targets for several performance measures.

Most organizations are structured vertically, creating hierarchical groupings of expertise and skills segmented by function, which can result in silos that are a major barrier to effective execution of strategies.

A key tenet is promoting engagement between stakeholders in a focused, efficient, and non-threatening way to apply their collective input to a few key outputs.

In order for MPOs to successfully establish performance targets and monitor progress, a process for identifying, prioritizing, analyzing, and measuring which projects and resources will deliver the highest return must be established.

To hear from Naquan Ishman, Solutions Engineering Director at Decision Lens, as he discusses best practices for setting quantifiable performance targets and structuring data for tracking and reporting, click below to watch the recorded webinar.